1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
|
"The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the
Christian Religion." -- George Washington
"I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion." -- Abraham Lincoln
"A just government has no need for the clergy or the church." -- James Madison
"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday
end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend
the church of his choice." -- John F. Kennedy
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and
nonbelievers." -- Barack Obama
.
"I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it."
.
"The Six Phases of a Project:"
- Enthusiasm
- Disillusionment
- Panic
- Search for the Guilty
- Punishment of the Innocent
- Praise for non-participants"
.
"...well over half of the time you spend working on a project
(on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool,
no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even
if a tool did everything except the thinking for you -- if it
wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the
documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs,
put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers -- the best
you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in
productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change
the way you think." -- Fred Brooks [paraphrased] as quoted from Allen Holub
.
"The road to wisdom?"
Well its plain and simple to express:
Err and err and err again,
but less and less and less." -- Piet Hein
.
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken
mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das
pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten. -- from "THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.9, 01 APR 1992
.
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining,
and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you
least expect it." -- Gene Spafford
.
"'Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?'
'It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right?" -- MacNelley, in "Shoe"
.
"My suggestion for an Official Usenet Motto: "If you have nothing
to say, then come on in, this is the place for you, tell us all
about it!" -- Hevard Fosseng [quotation collector]
.
AMAZING BUT TRUE ...
There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread
out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
.
"Ah, you know the type. They like to blame it all on the Jews
or the Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up
to the fact that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and
ultimately unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY
can't seem to keep up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers." -- An analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic
.
"So I went to the dentist. He said "Say Aaah." I said "Why?"
He said "My dog's died.'" -- Tommy Cooper
.
ICTOARTCYAODHTIOTSSIWRTNCAHICGAWI, Acronym: "I Can't Think Of
Anything Reasonable To Counter Your Argument Or Don't Have The
Least Inkling Of The Subject So I Will Resort To Name Calling
And Hope I Can Get Away With It." -- Ken de Camargo, borland.public.off-topic
.
The "abort()" function is now called "choice()." -- from the "Politically Correct UNIX System VI Release notes"
.
"Men are not disturbed by things, but the view they take of things." -- Epictetus (55-135 A.D.)
"What about things like bullets?" -- Herb Kimmel, Behavioralist, Professor of Psychology, upon hearing the above quote (1981)
.
"#3 pencils and quadrille pads."
-- Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when asked what CAD tools he used
to design the Cray I supercomputer; he also recommended using
the back side of the pages so that the lines were not so
dominant.
.
"Dieu me pardonnera. C'est son m?tier."
Translation: God forgive me. It's his job. -- Heinrich Heine, dying words.
.
"If you were my husband, I'd give you poison." -- Lady Astor to Churchill
"If you were my wife, I'd take it." -- Curchill to Lady Astor
.
'Nix Tech Support:
Customer: "I'm running Windows '95."
Tech: "Yes."
Customer: "My computer isn't working now."
Tech: "Yes, you said that."
.
Finagle's Laws:
1. Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes
it worse.
2. No matter what results are expected, someone is always
willing to fake it.
3. No matter what the result, someone is always eager to
misinterpret it.
4. No matter what occurs, someone believes it happened
according to his pet theory.
.
Finagle's Rules:
1. To study an application best, understand it thoroughly
before you start.
2. Always keep a record of data. It indicates you've been
working.
3. Always draw your curves, then plot the reading.
4. In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.
5. Program results should always be reproducible. They should
all fail in the same way.
6. Do not believe in miracles. Rely on them.
.
Gilb's Laws Of Unreliability:
1. At the source of every error which is blamed on the
computer you will find at least two human errors, including
the error of blaming it on the computer.
2. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
3. Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to
detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
4. Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the
probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on
getting some useful work done.
.
Ginsberg's Theorem:
1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't even quit the game.
.
Hind's Law of Computer Programming:
1. Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
2. If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
3. If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
4. Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.
5. The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its
output.
6. Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of
the programmer who must maintain it.
7. Make it possible for programmers to write programs in
English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in
English.
.
Murphy's Laws:
1. If anything can go wrong, it will (and at the worst
possible moment).
2. Nothing is as easy as it looks.
3. Everything takes longer than you think it will.
.
Snafu Equations:
1. Given any problem containing N equations, there will be N+1
unknowns.
2. An object or bit of information most needed will be least
available.
3. Any device requiring service or adjustment will be least
accessible.
4. Interchangeable devices won't.
5. In any human endeavor, once you have exhausted all
possibilities and fail, there will be one solution, simple
and obvious, highly visible to everyone else.
6. Badness comes in waves.
.
Thoreau's Theories Of Adaptation:
1. After months of training and you finally understand all of
a program's commands, a revised version of the program
arrives with an all-new command structure.
2. After designing a useful routine that gets around a
familiar "bug" in the system, the system is revised, the
"bug" taken away, and you're left with a useless routine.
3. Efforts in improving a program's "user friendliness"
invariable lead to work in improving user's "computer
literacy".
4. That's not a "bug", that's a feature!
.
The Law Of The Too Solid Goof: In any collection of data, the
figures that are obviously correct beyond all need of checking
contain the errors.
Corollary 1: No one you ask for help will see the error either.
Corollary 2: Any nagging intruder, who stops by with unsought advice, will spot it immediately.
.
Laws Of Project Management:
1. No major project is ever installed on time, within budgets,
with the staff that started it. Yours will not be the
first.
2. Projects progress quickly until they become 90 percent
complete, then they remain at 90 percent complete forever.
3. One advantage of fuzzy project objectives is that they let
you avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding
costs.
4. When things are going well, something will go wrong. When
things just can't get any worse, they will. When things
appear to be going better you have overlooked something.
5. If project content is allowed to change freely, the rate of
change will exceed the rate of progress.
6. No system is ever completely debugged. Attempts to debug a
system inevitably introduce new bugs that are even harder
to find.
7. A carelessly planned project will take three times longer
to complete than expected; a carefully planned project will
take only twice as long.
8. Project teams detest progress reporting because it vividly
manifests their lack of progress.
.
"Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced
garbage is indistinguishable from magic."
.
"Mit der Dummheit k?mpfen G?tter selbst vergebens" - "Against stupidity the (very) gods themselves contend in vain" -- Friedrich von Schiller
.
"Do you program in Assembly??" she asked. "NOP," he said.
.
|